


Elemental

by merely



Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-17 05:54:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16968933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merely/pseuds/merely
Summary: Fire, water, earth, air: a love story.





	Elemental

**Author's Note:**

  * For [untilitbleeds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/untilitbleeds/gifts).



The entire time the witch had him locked up to fatten like a pig in a sty, Hansel never saw Gretel cry. It wasn't that she was hiding away in a corner to do it, either; he would have known, even if she tried to keep it a secret. Gretel never cried much, even before the witch -- not like Hansel, who cried all the time, because he was hungry, or cold, or frightened. She just raised her chin and squeezed his hand and kept going. Their mother used to say that crying was important, because it made you feel better, and if Gretel was going to be stubborn about it then it would have to be Hansel's job to cry for her and make her bruises and skinned knees feel better -- but that was before, so it didn't matter, anyway. 

Gretel didn't cry after they killed the witch, either, and shoved her into her own oven and watched her burn with intent, hungry eyes. When there was nothing left but ash, she was the one who thought to ransack the cottage for food and clothing and weapons, when Hansel wanted to set fire to the whole thing and run barefoot out into the woods. That was Gretel through and through: practical to a fault. She was right, of course; being angry wouldn't keep them from starving or freezing to death, and the witch wouldn't be any more dead if they burned down the house around her, and maybe set the forest on fire and killed everyone for miles around and themselves too while they were at it. Hansel thought maybe it was like crying, though: it wouldn't have really helped, but it would have made it feel better. 

So they were still hungry and cold, but not enough to die of it, when they left the cottage made of candy and went out into the woods to try and find their way to a town, and Hansel was frightened but he held Gretel's hand tight and kept going. He'd seen scarier things than the woods, now. When they stopped for the night and laid a fire and sat down to eat the bread and cheese and apples they'd found in the witch's house, a little moldy but still perfectly edible, it was almost like they were just spending the night outside for fun to watch the stars, and it was all right that sleeping on just a blanket on the ground was uncomfortable because tomorrow they would be home and asleep in their own beds, and their mother would make them a real dinner and tuck them in and kiss them goodnight. 

"Do you think we'll be able to find our way home?" he asked, caught up in his fantasy of being full and safe and warm. 

"No," Gretel said in a hard voice. She was staring at the fire. "And I don't care. Father left us in the woods and they never came for us. We're on our own now." 

"But -- "

"I don't want to talk about them anymore," she said. "Go to sleep. I'll stay up and keep an eye on the fire." 

There wasn't any point in arguing, so Hansel wrapped himself up in the blanket as best he could and lay down with his head in Gretel's lap and tried to fall asleep. He did doze off for a little while, ignoring everything except the slow comforting movement of Gretel's fingers in his hair, but he woke up again from dreams of thunderstorms to the sound of her hitching breathing and wetness dripping like raindrops down onto his face. "It's all right to be scared," he mumbled. 

"I'm not _scared_ ," Gretel said with a loud sniff. 

"I am." Hansel turned his face toward the fire and opened his eyes. The witch had wanted to put him in the oven, but then he and Gretel had put her in it instead and now they were free. The fire wasn't good or evil, it just was, and it would burn him if he put his hand in it but it would also keep them from being cold at night. He wondered if it made him good or evil, that he would have burned down the entire wood and every village that bordered on it and every person in them, to keep the witch from putting Gretel in the oven with him. 

"I'm going to take care of you," Gretel said, "so stop being scared." 

"We're going to take care of each other," he corrected her. He rolled over so his face was against her stomach instead of looking at the fire and wrapped his arms around her middle. After a moment she leaned down and put her arms around his shoulders, too. It wasn't comfortable, but they weren't going to sleep anyway. "So it's all right to be scared, and it's all right to cry. Because I'm going to take care of you too." 

*

It was a beautiful summer's afternoon, the day that Gretel finally learned to swim. They had no one to teach them, but she was tired of being afraid for herself and for Hansel every time they neared the edge of a river or lake: it was too obvious a vulnerability, and hunting witches was dangerous enough without leaving a completely mundane gap in their defenses. So instead of packing up their camp above the stream and moving on to the next town with a rumored witch infestation, Gretel dragged her brother down to the water, stripped off her clothes, and waded in. 

Hansel grumbled about the cold water, but he followed her anyway. He had grown over the spring, suddenly adding on inches and pounds after two years of complaining that he had to look up at her, and the water was only chest-deep for him when it came up over her chin, which was annoying enough before it became clear that Hansel could float and Gretel couldn't. He wasn't even really swimming, just drifting in the current or paddling a little to return to her, but it didn't seem to take him any effort either, while she splashed and flailed and sank like a stone. 

"Here," he said at last, kicking his way back to her after she resurfaced for the seventeenth time with a frustrated shriek. "I'll hold you up, all right? Just until you feel how it's supposed to be." In the water it was easy for him to pick her up, one arm under her knees and the other under her back, and keep her suspended just barely under the surface. "I think you have to relax a little more than that, Gretel." 

"I don't have enough fat," she said, almost whining. She hated failing at things, and even more intensely despised being worse at anything than Hansel. "I won't float." 

"Uh," Hansel said. His eyes flickered to her breasts and then back to her face, not quite quickly enough to escape notice. They weren't new, exactly, but they'd grown bigger at the same time Hansel was growing taller, and neither of them was exactly sure how to feel about it. "I think you have just the right amount of fat?" 

"They don't help with _swimming_ ," Gretel said crossly. "Or keeping warm. And they're not that big, anyway." 

"I think they're just the right size," Hansel said with increasing confidence. "It doesn't matter. Just lie back and relax, all right? I won't let you sink." 

Gretel sighed and then grudgingly obeyed, letting her head fall back until the water covered her ears. The noises of the forest around them faded away beneath the rushing sound of the water, and without thinking she let her eyes drift shut as well. All she could feel was the current gently pushing her toward Hansel's chest and the warmth of his hands supporting her. It was the most peaceful she could ever remember being. 

"There," Hansel said, just barely loud enough for her to hear through the water. "You're floating." 

*

"So," Hansel said. He had to time it carefully, so the words would fit in between the rasp of Gretel's shovel driving into the ground and the grunt as she sent the dirt sailing backwards over her head. "Why aren't you mad at me about Mina?" 

Gretel paused long enough to swipe at the sweat and grime on her forehead, succeeding only in spreading them more liberally across her face, and then went back to digging. "Maybe I am mad at you," she said. 

"No, you're not," Hansel said. "I can tell. But I don't know why you're not." 

"Why do you think I should be?" 

"Uh, I got dragged into the woods and I didn't come back as soon as I woke up to find you, even though I knew you didn't know where I was," he said, ticking off the reasons on his fingers one by one. "I let Mina live, even though I knew she was a witch. I had sex with her. I let her use magic on our weapons. I brought her along to rescue you." 

"Okay, so?" Gretel finally stopped digging and left the shovel standing up in the dirt while she scrambled up out of the half-excavated grave. "You _did_ rescue me. Mina helped." 

"Did you miss the part where I had sex with her?" 

"No, it was pretty obvious."

"So why aren't you mad?" 

Gretel stared at him for long enough that Hansel started to shift his weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable with the silence. "Are you mad that I'm _not_ mad?" 

"No!" Hansel said, indignant. 

"Because that's what it sounds like." 

"I'm not _mad_ , I'm just... confused." 

Hansel watched warily as Gretel walked up to him, close enough that the smell of having spent the afternoon digging up a grave in leather trousers was almost a physical force pushing him backwards. "I'm not mad because it _doesn't matter_ , idiot. Am I supposed to be scared that she was suddenly going to be more important to you than I am? Fucking her wasn't going to make her your sister. I don't care how many women you've been inside, none of them is ever going to be inside _you_ as deep as I am. You're going to be mine until they put us in the ground." She flicked him between the eyes without warning, laughed at his yelp of surprise, and jumped back into the hole. "Which is why you should stop being such an asshole to Edward, by the way." 

"You're not fucking Edward," Hansel argued. He was pretty sure about that. Edward seemed even more like a little kid than Ben, most of the time, following Gretel around like a duckling that had decided she was his mother. She definitely _loved_ Edward, though, which was stranger territory than if she'd just decided to fuck a troll for some reason. 

"No, I'm not. Obviously." She looked up at him, one eyebrow raised in that look he both loved and resented: it said _don't be such an idiot_. "Are you really going to make me say it? It doesn't matter, Hansel. Nothing and nobody is ever going to me more important to me than you." 

Hansel jumped down after her to hide how much the words felt like being punched in the chest. She didn't talk about things that mattered, usually; they'd spent years walking away from conversations about how they'd become witch hunters, years not so much as mentioning that they had ever had parents. It was just hard sometimes to tell what they weren't talking about because it didn't matter at all, and what they weren't talking about because it mattered too much. "Not even Ben?" he teased when he'd gotten his breath back, holding out a hand for the shovel. "You'll ruin his dreams." 

"His wet dreams, maybe," Gretel said, eyes rolling, but she let him take it. "Ben was _your_ idea. I'd sell him to a passing trader for two buttons and a piece of stale bread. But stop being a shit to Edward, he doesn't deserve it." 

"I'm certainly regretting sending him off on errands with Ben this morning," Hansel conceded. The ground was packed harder the further down they went, and Gretel had already gotten all the loose dirt out of the way: what was left would take twice the time and effort to get rid of, and she'd been digging for hours. Edward, to give credit where it was due, was better equipped for physical labor than the rest of them put together, and complained significantly less. 

"Really?" Gretel had produced a pickaxe from her pack and was twirling it in the air, sweaty and filthy and grinning like she was having the time of her life. "I was just thinking this felt like the good old days. Just you and me and the dead witch we're digging up so we can set her corpse on fire." 

"It's good to get back to our roots," Hansel agreed, and started to dig. 

*

The first thing Gretel was aware of as she drifted her way toward consciousness was the sound of Hansel's breathing. It was faster and shallower than usual, which was… worrying, she thought fuzzily. Hansel needed air to live. It was important. 

The second thing she noticed was that she was in a lot of pain. "Mother _fucker_ ," she groaned. 

"Don't move," Hansel said immediately. "Just -- hold still, all right? You're really banged up and I don't know if you hurt your spine." 

"What happened?" Gretel asked. Normally she would have let Hansel know exactly what she thought about him trying to give her orders, but she was almost grateful for the excuse not to try to get up; she was pretty sure her leg was broken. "I feel like I fell off a cliff." 

"Well. Funny story. You fell off a cliff." 

"Oh. I guess that makes sense. Why are you down here with me? Did you fall too?" 

"No, I jumped," he said, almost cheerfully, so she had to ignore the grinding sensation in her probably-almost-definitely cracked ribs to sit up and slap him upside the head. "Ow! I told you to stay still!" 

"Well, I don't listen to idiots who jump off cliffs!" 

"It was a completely rational decision," Hansel said, and he even sounded like he meant it. "You have magic, so I figured if you woke up you could fix us both. And if you didn't wake up it's not like I give a shit what happens to me anyway." 

"You would have changed your mind pretty damn quick if you ended up paralyzed and dying of sugar sickness next to my decomposing body," Gretel snapped. 

"No. I wouldn't." 

There wasn't anything Gretel could say to that, so she ignored Hansel and concentrated on finding a comfortable position to sit in. She couldn't do much about her ribs, but she managed in the end to get her busted leg stretched out in front of her while she leaned up against the rock face, and at least it wasn't actively making things worse. The sky was almost offensively blue and sunlight poured down into the canyon, giving her an excellent opportunity to see how fucked she and Hansel were: nothing but a goat was going to make it down under its own power, let alone Ben and a cart. Edward might be able to do it, but even for a troll, it was going to be a long, slow trip. 

"So about those magical powers you haven't really been using," Hansel said, after they'd both sat in silence for a while and contemplated the awesome natural beauty of what was probably going to be their final resting place and did their level best not to aggravate any of their bruises. "Now would probably be a good time to whip them out." 

"Ben has the spellbook," Gretel said. 

"Okay, I agree that that's less than ideal, but the thing is, you've got a broken leg and probably some broken ribs and a whole lot of things bleeding inside that aren't supposed to be bleeding, and I am, in addition to bruised all to hell, going to run out of medicine by the time the sun goes down, so if you don't want us to die here, you're going to have to improvise." Hansel returned her glare with a weak grin. "On the bright side, it's pretty much impossible for you to make the situation any worse." 

Gretel took as deep a breath as she could without making her ribs scream in agony — it wasn't particularly deep — and let it out in a sigh. "Well, hell. The introduction to the book does say most spells are just ritual trappings to shore up the weak wills of inferior witches." 

"Wow," said Hansel. The book stayed in its pack when he was around, for the most part; Gretel only let Ben take it out when Hansel was asleep or out hunting or otherwise occupied. She didn't like the idea of using magic where he could see. It probably wasn't surprising that Hansel didn't know the first thing about what was actually _in_ the book. 

"Yeah, whoever wrote the first couple of chapters was a really condescending asshole," she said. "According to them, all a _true_ white witch needs is 'the force of her will and the breath of her lungs', whatever that means. Ben and I haven't figured it out yet." 

Hansel let out a pained grunt and scooted closer, until he was almost but not quite touching her side and could put out his hand, fingers already mottled purple and swelling up like sausages, where she could reach. "You might be short on breath right now," he said, "but nobody ever claimed you were short on will." 

Gretel put her hand in his and held on tight. Hansel didn't make a sound, even though she knew it had to be painful. "Breath of my lungs, force of my will," she muttered. "Here goes." 

The funny thing was, when she closed her eyes and let herself feel everything, all the places where things were wrong with her body and the warmth of Hansel's hand in hers, she could almost understand what the spellbook was talking about. The magic was there, too, inside her body, just like the blood and bones and bruises, and if she concentrated on it, it went where she wanted, burning hot and cold at the same time and leaving things put back together _the way she willed them_. That was all it meant. "Gretel," Hansel whispered. "Gretel, it's _working_." 

But when she opened her eyes, his hand was still bruised and swollen in hers, even though she could breathe without wanting to scream and her leg, when she flexed it, felt like she could run a hundred miles without complaint. "It's not working on you," she said. "Why isn't it working on you?" 

"Maybe you still need a spell to use magic on other people," Hansel suggested. "That kind of makes sense, right? White witches aren't supposed to use magic on people, or whatever." 

"You aren't _other people_ ," Gretel said. She climbed up onto her knees and crawled over to straddle his lap, still holding his hand too tight. He stared back at her in silence, pupils blown wide, although whether out of pain or something else she couldn't tell. "You are mine. You are part of me. You are -- _the breath in my lungs_ ," she said, suddenly understanding something else, and leaned forward to press her mouth against his. 

The magic still didn't want to leave her body and go into his, but this time she kept pushing. _He is part of me_ , she thought fiercely, as if her magic was a person she could argue with, _his body is my body, and you are going to go where I tell you._

A moment later the barrier between them gave way, and she felt her magic pour out of her at the same instant that Hansel gasped into her mouth and started kissing her in earnest. It was as though she had made her words true just by believing them: her magic was flowing through Hansel's body, and everywhere it went she could feel it like it really was her body, just another set of arms and legs and lungs. She would have said, before, that there was nothing in her brother that she didn't know already, but now she was in his heart and he was in hers and there was so much there to feel. 

Being in two bodies at once was a life-changing experience, but it was also uncomfortable once the flush of novelty wore off, so when Gretel was finished fixing all of Hansel's bruises, both external and internal, she let the burning/freezing sensation of her magic flow back to where it wanted to live: somewhere in the vicinity of her kidneys, as it turned out. She was perfectly willing to go on kissing -- it would probably be even better without the distraction of finding all the places where blood was pooling under Hansel's skin -- but Hansel pulled away instead. "I love you," he said. 

"Yes, obviously," Gretel said impatiently. She didn't know what sugar sickness looked or felt like in a body and she wasn't going to try fixing it with nothing but a vague idea of what was wrong and the force of her will, so they were still operating under the time limit of Hansel's last dose of medicine before they had to rejoin Ben and Edward. She didn't particularly care what Ben thought about the change in her and Hansel's relationship, and Edward would go along with whatever she wanted without questioning it, but she still wasn't interested in wasting their privacy on _talking_. 

"And -- you love me," said Hansel. 

" _Yes, obviously_ ," she repeated. "Are you just going to keep saying things we both already know? I am sitting _in your lap_ , I can tell there are other things you'd rather be doing." 

"And you're okay with that," he said, as if he was genuinely unsure. As if she hadn't just put her mouth on his and breathed into his lungs and used her magic to make his body hers. As if there was any possible thing he could ever do or want that would make her love him any less than she did, which was more than the world and every other living creature in it. 

"Hansel," she said, "I want to, too." That finally succeeded in getting Hansel to kiss her again, so Gretel was willing to admit that words were not _always_ a complete waste of time. 

Between the kissing and the various forms of exploration that followed, the sun was starting to get low by the time they were ready to leave. "I'm not sure I can climb all the way up on my last dose," Hansel admitted, staring up the cliff face. "Maybe I should stay down here, and you can try and lower the medicine to me?" 

"Hansel, I'm a _witch_ ," Gretel reminded him. She leaned in to kiss him again, because she could and she felt like it and the breath in his lungs was hers by right, now. "You don't need to climb anything ever again. We can fly."


End file.
